Network approach in cultural projects within local governments: Culture department at Pueblo Libre’s district from 2015 to 2018

Abstract

The investigation take place in the local government of Pueblo Libre during the year 2017, it has as main objective: evaluate the level of external articulation of the Youth, Sports, Education, Culture and Tourism Management of the local government of Pueblo Libre in the period 2015-2018, taking as reference methodological tools that are derived from Social Network Analysis (SNA). This analysis is possible thanks to the networks between organizations that exchange resources in a specific context, this is part of the term applied in social sciences: social capital, defined as: "a resource centered and distributed in the structure of relationships or networks. Only indirectly, and as a result that comes from the articulation of relationships and the formation of cohesive groups and / or equivalence classes, the attributes or classifications appear "(Lozares & Martí, 2008, p.24).

Qualitative tools were used to measure the level of articulation between the local government of Pueblo Libre and the other cultural organizations of the district. All the information collected from the field work was encoded and processed in the WebQDA software. To do this, a weight scale was used that ranged from level one to level six, being the strongest link between two organizations the participation in joint projects. Likewise, it stipulated the type of link that the organization maintained, and this made reference to the resource that flowed in the network either it was tangible or intangible. After that we obtained the matrices of weights and links, allowed to enter the information to Gephi, obtaining the graphic of the Pueblo Libre cultural network and the result of the variables to be analyzed.

The local government presented the largest number of links (24) of the Pueblo Libre cultural network. However, 50% of the links identified are of a weak nature and, in addition, evaluating the density variable resulted in 15.7%, showing the low level of articulation. The local government must consider the cultural potential translated into tourism and history to generate development projects that meet the cultural needs of the neighbors. In this sense, it is recommended not to limit cultural activities for economic reasons to generate links that allow the flow of diverse resources in the network.

Finally, it is important to promote the approach towards other organizations through dialogue in order to know the strategic cultural objectives of both parties and achieve the mobilization of resources.